thebratqueen | Angel 4.6 - Spin the Bottle (Reply)

Okay, first off let me say I didn't hate this episode. I wanna emphasize that because I'm about to rip it to shreds. I'm not saying it's the Worst. Episode. Ever. I'm just saying I didn't like it. If we're playing Death Is Not An Option - well, we wouldn't even have to. I'd watch this over again, while not even the tuxes could force me to sit through another viewing of Waiting in the Wings with the sound turned on.

But this was just not good. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good either. And I feel like I need to explain why b/c so far when I've told people I didn't like it they give me big puppy eyes like I just told them that Santa's not real and they don't understand why.

Lemme cover the good first -

Dork Angel wasn't painful. Once again we had an episode with the right combination of what Angel is good and with what he's bad at. When he was dark he was dark and when he was Liam he was believably stupid without being annoying or stupid for stupid's sake.

AD played off dork Wesley very well, and for once they remembered to direct most of those scenes straight, if you'll pardon the pun. People tripping over themselves is only kinda funny. People tripping over themselves and trying to take it in stride is funnier. I think the best example of how this was handled was when Wes's stake popped out during the "probe" conversation and Wes, without changing expression at all, casually pushed it back in.

Some of the Wes/Gunn interaction (slash and otherwise) was good - I'll get to the not good in a second - and I liked the show don't tell nature of everyone coming together with their various issues where we were allowed to use our brains to know why everyone was acting the way they were.

I liked some aspects of the Lorne framing. Him stopping in the middle of scenes to narrate in the scene was nice.

There were a few funny lines.

Therein lies the end of what was good. Now let me talk about all the other stuff that makes this a meh episode.

It didn't take me five seconds to wonder how bored Lorne's supposed audience would be. Showing him leaving an empty room with ghostly applause at the end didn't help matters. I was fine for the narrative concept of Lorne relating the story during an act - I thought it played fine in the wildfeed. But the actual execution of it didn't make sense. We've seen Lorne tell his audiences stories before so we know he can do it interestingly. So JW needed to make the choice here that Lorne was talking to an actual crowd of people, or that he was breaking the fourth wall and talking to us. Given that I think JW was trying to use this to set us up for what's to come, I think he should have gone with the latter.

The show had no internal logic. I get that it was supposed to be silly. I get that it was supposed to be filler. I'm fine with silly, I'm fine with filler. I loved Tabula Rasa. But TR worked on an internal logic that helped us go along with the episode. StB did not.

Basically this is the classic rule of AUs - you need to give your audience something to hang on to. TR did that by showing us how all the characters were in the exact same state of amnesia, giving us a plausible explanation for how they reacted to the events that followed, and giving us versions of the characters that we could recognize. With that foundation in place, we could then enjoy the silliness of Anya and Giles being engaged, and Spike rabbiting on about his noble mission and so on and so forth.

StB should have had a good foundation in that it returned the characters to earlier versions of themselves, but it destroyed that foundation by not grounding everyone in a similar state. Cordy was a sophmore - was Wes? Fred thought they were supposed to be 17. Gunn was who knew what. So even though, yeah, we could look at Cordy and see Queen C, and look at Wes and recognize his pre-Sunnydale self, and look at Gunn and know this was his street self, the fact that none of them seemed to be on the same page destroyed what stability we should have been having here. Wes, Cordy and Gunn should have been our keys to letting us figure out what was going on with the others. By writing them illogically we lost that clue and therefore couldn't connect to the rest.

Now watch how the rest unravels - Angel thinks he's Liam. Okay. He's got no brogue - okay, funny shout out to DB's amazing skill to create the worst version of an Irish brogue since Tom Cruise starred in Far and Away. He's not the brightest bulb in the room - also okay.

He's never had a drink yet.

Waaa???

Look, I know historical research and this show are some seriously unmixy things (Darla we're looking at you) but if Liam was supposed to be 17, trust me, he'd have had a drink.

Then add on top of that that the Liam here bears an exact 0 resemblance to the Liam we saw in flashbacks to Angelus's making. Now as others have said, it's okay for them to tell us that Liam wasn't always that way. Possibly there was something in his late teens/early 20s to inspire the change, but when you're giving us absolutely nothing to hang on to as a Liam we recognize, we once again need that internal logic to help us figure this out.

Now for me the perfect explanation for all this would have been that Liam was much younger. I could buy a 14 or 15 year old Liam in this context - which would've worked with Cordy's sophmore idea. But we've got no way to tell, so we're stuck wondering what we're looking at when we should be going along for the ride.

The internal logic fails on the accents too. Liam had none, but Fred was drawling all over the place and Gunn had his 'hood accent back (I'll accept Wes's prissier speech as a mannerism).

The memories made no sense too. I can buy a sophmore Cordy who has flashed back to the pre-Buffy Sunnydale days, but if Wes can remember that he's head boy why doesn't Gunn worry about his sister?

You get the idea. The spell needed to have a single rule that worked for all of them, and from that step we should have had our story. But without any form of consistancy it turned the whole thing into mush. TR may have been filler, but it revealed interesting things about the characters and showed them in fun new lights. StB could have done much the same, except without knowing our hypothesis we can't draw any conclusions. All we get out of this is "spells make you do the wacky". Which also could have been fine but since we were beaten over the head with "Younger! It made them their younger selves! GET IT?" I gotta mourn the loss of what would have been a much more fun and useful episode.

Add on top of that the fact that even for the fact that they were acting off we didn't really get that much out of it. Liam was about the funniest and most useful since he was played for both jokes and a little internal revelations. But everyone else was one single note played over and over and over again. I came away from this feeling like this was at best a fifteen minute joke that was forced to last an hour. We needed variations on the theme. Yeah, Wes and Gunn bickering was cute but it was the same each and every time (almost down to the lines). They should have played that up somehow. Either show the bickering escalating between them into funnier and funnier jokes or go for a little character depth by showing Wes and Gunn becoming unlikely friends again only to leave each other cold when the memories return. Wes doing a thousand variations on "I was just going to SAY that!" doesn't cut it, no matter how hot AD looked (ahem).

As long as I'm talking about W/G, lemme get to the other thing that fell flat, which was the pissing contest over Fred. Granted, this season has played the W/F and F/G emotions as far more believable than last season could ever hope to, but when you get right down to it the girl is not THAT damn hot or interesting. I don't buy two guys - one of whom is banging Lilah - feeling that strong an urge to whip it out and measure just to see which one of them can go home with the dishrag.

Final msc comments:

Fred as a stoner? I call no way.

Memo to Joss: You can have River, or you can have Fred. You can NOT make them the SAME DAMN CHARACTER. What the fuck is it with this sudden fetish with dishraggy genius girls who get screwed over by government institutions working through schools? GET OVER IT.

Why didn't they actually check the doors? I was fine with Liam's shiny demons being a good reason to keep them there - use it earlier.

And just to show that I'm not totally made of wood: "I'm invisible." "No you're not" - hee!